I'm not quite new here...
Like many people who live in this part of the world, I am not originally from here. Born in Montreal, raised in Toronto and Michigan, college educated in Virginia, married to an American from Texas, and father to an Connecticut-born and Kansas-raised daughter and son, I never expected to return to this land of endless summer days, and long, dark winter nights.
In my last summer of high school and first three summers of college, I was an apprentice (later gang) lineman up here. We climbed telephone poles, built microwave towers, lived in tents and banked $1000s of dollars over the short, intense summers. Big money for a high school or college kid, and it paid for much of my tuition. And I saw country I never expected to see again... Whitehorse, Yellowknife, The MacKenzie River, Inuvik, Norman Wells, Hay Riiver, Fort Providence, Rae Lakes, Muncho Lake, Fort Nelson and Rae-Edzo...
The names come back to me as memories formed along the dusty, then gravel topped, Alaska Highway, which runs north into the spine of the top of the Rockies, meandering through spruce forests and un-named mountain peaks up to Whitehorse, and beyond. Little aborginal towns of 100 souls, almost lost on the broad expanse of endless lakes and rock the comprise the Canadian Shield. Fast flowing and figid rivers that carry the last of the winter ice, and wash the bugs and the forest fire smoke and rain clouds through the memories, now a quarter century old, of the summers of my youth.
The days were long, the work just what a 17 to 21 year old needed to feel exhausted by day's end. Work days were fueled by huge breakfasts of ham and cheese omelets, toast, pancakes, bacon and milk and coffee, all paid for, along with my room and transportation, by the company that employed me. What an adventure to study English and History all winter in Virginia, and then train and fly 4000 mies to put on a hardhat and gloves, and breath the fresh, cool, spruce-scented air of this open country, and work from 8 am until 11 pm in those endless summer days. To commute to work by hitchhiking, or riding in a Ford F250 pickup, or fly to a jobsite in a bright yellow Ptarmigan Airways Twin Otter floatplane, and old red Aero Arctic Sikorsky helicopter or PWA (Pacific Western Airlines) 737. As I reel off these names, I realize that they are all gone now, swallowed up by corporate consolidation, or closed down by the end of the last century.
In my last summer of high school and first three summers of college, I was an apprentice (later gang) lineman up here. We climbed telephone poles, built microwave towers, lived in tents and banked $1000s of dollars over the short, intense summers. Big money for a high school or college kid, and it paid for much of my tuition. And I saw country I never expected to see again... Whitehorse, Yellowknife, The MacKenzie River, Inuvik, Norman Wells, Hay Riiver, Fort Providence, Rae Lakes, Muncho Lake, Fort Nelson and Rae-Edzo...
The names come back to me as memories formed along the dusty, then gravel topped, Alaska Highway, which runs north into the spine of the top of the Rockies, meandering through spruce forests and un-named mountain peaks up to Whitehorse, and beyond. Little aborginal towns of 100 souls, almost lost on the broad expanse of endless lakes and rock the comprise the Canadian Shield. Fast flowing and figid rivers that carry the last of the winter ice, and wash the bugs and the forest fire smoke and rain clouds through the memories, now a quarter century old, of the summers of my youth.
The days were long, the work just what a 17 to 21 year old needed to feel exhausted by day's end. Work days were fueled by huge breakfasts of ham and cheese omelets, toast, pancakes, bacon and milk and coffee, all paid for, along with my room and transportation, by the company that employed me. What an adventure to study English and History all winter in Virginia, and then train and fly 4000 mies to put on a hardhat and gloves, and breath the fresh, cool, spruce-scented air of this open country, and work from 8 am until 11 pm in those endless summer days. To commute to work by hitchhiking, or riding in a Ford F250 pickup, or fly to a jobsite in a bright yellow Ptarmigan Airways Twin Otter floatplane, and old red Aero Arctic Sikorsky helicopter or PWA (Pacific Western Airlines) 737. As I reel off these names, I realize that they are all gone now, swallowed up by corporate consolidation, or closed down by the end of the last century.
posted by Peter Merrick Turner at 3:15 a.m.
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